Letters
Oliver Sacks
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Letters
Oliver Sacks
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Six decades of Sacks’s letters have been expertly woven into an effulgent collection of humanistic observations and descriptions, philosophical musings, personal anecdotes, epiphanies and poetry, all of which resonate with grace, gratitude humor and humility.
A meticulous, thorough and loving selection that constitutes not only a series of reflections and explorations but also a gripping memoir, a Bildungsroman at one remove.
Sacks was insatiably curious and wrote ceaselessly and joyfully about anything that caught his interest, which was just about everything. Readers get a new glimpse into his mind this year, nearly a decade after his death, thanks to a handsome new collection of the doctor’s letters.
The first 200 pages of Oliver Sacks’s letters are among the best things I’ve read all year. He was new in America, not long out of Oxford University, writing to family and friends back home, and his observations were electric — wild and funny and befuddled and frank.
These well-edited letters, with their brief but useful footnotes, will only add to his lustre. Although they sometimes show the rhetoric, extravagance and self-pity Gunn deplored in Sacks, they also show the extraordinary breadth of his scholarship and his real genius for describing people and natural phenomena..
Sacks wrote in a learned, stylish and energetic prose.
Sacks is an endearing and entertaining prose stylist – inquisitive, often funny, never obtuse.
Intimate.